How to Be Good by Nick Hornby Page B

imagine him going down on GoodNews than it is for me to picture him kneeling on the floor and meditating.
    â€˜And that was OK, was it? When he asked you to meditate? You didn’t, you know, hit him or anything?’
    â€˜No. The old David would have, I know. And that would have been wrong.’ He says this with such earnestness that I am temporarily tempted to abandon my own position on domestic violence. ‘I must admit, it did make me feel a little uncomfortable at first, but there’s so much to think about. Isn’t there?’
    I agree that yes, there is an enormous amount to think about.
    â€˜I mean, just thinking about one’s own personal circumstances . . .’ (‘One’s own personal circumstances’? Who is this man, who talks to his own wife in his own bed in phrases from ‘Thoughtfor the Day’?) ‘. . . That could occupy you for hours. Days. And then there’s everything else . . .’
    â€˜What, the world and all that? Suffering and so on?’ It is impossible not to be facetious, I am beginning to find, with someone from whom all trace of facetiousness, every atom of self-irony, seems to have vanished.
    â€˜Yes, of course. I had no idea how much people suffered until I was given the time and space to think about it.’
    â€˜So now what?’ I don’t want to go through this process. I want to take a short cut and go right to the part where I find out what all this means for me me me.
    â€˜I don’t know. All I know is I want to live a better life. I want us to live a better life.’
    â€˜And how do we do that?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    I cannot help but feel that all this sounds very ominous indeed.
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    Stephen leaves a message on my mobile. I don’t return the call.
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    I come home the next night to the sound of trouble; even as I’m putting the key in the lock I can hear Tom shouting and Molly crying.
    â€˜What’s going on?’ David and the kids are sitting around the kitchen table, David at the head, Molly to his left, Tom to his right. The table has been cleared of its usual detritus – post, old newspapers, small plastic models found in cereal packets – apparently in an attempt to create the atmosphere of a conference.
    â€˜He’s given my computer away,’ says Tom. Tom doesn’t often cry, but his eyes are glistening, either with fury or tears, it’s hard to tell.
    â€˜And now I’ve got to share mine,’ says Molly, whose ability to cry has never been in any doubt, and who now looks as though she has been mourning the deaths of her entire family in a car crash.
    â€˜We didn’t need two,’ says David. ‘Two is . . . Not obscene, exactly. But certainly greedy. They’re never on the things at the same time.’
    â€˜So you just gave one away. Without consulting them. Or me.’
    â€˜I felt that consultation would have been pointless.’
    â€˜You mean that they wouldn’t have wanted you to do it?’
    â€˜They maybe wouldn’t have understood why I wanted to.’
    It was David, of course, who insisted on the kids having a computer each for Christmas last year. I had wanted them to share, not because I’m mean, but because I was beginning to worry about spoiling them, and the sight of these two enormous boxes beside the tree (they wouldn’t fit under it) did nothing to ease my queasiness. This wasn’t the kind of parent I wanted to be, I remember thinking, as Tom and Molly attacked the acres of wrapping paper with a violence that repelled me; David saw the look on my face and whispered to me that I was a typical joyless liberal, the sort of person who would deny their kids everything and themselves nothing. And here I am six months later, outraged that my son and daughter aren’t allowed to keep what is theirs, and yet still, somehow, on the wrong side, an agent of the